NEW DELHI: In a setback to Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh and his son Uttar Pradesh chief minister Akhilesh Yadav, the Supreme Court on Thursday refused to rollback its earlier order directing CBI to probe allegations of their possessing assets disproportionate to their known sources of income.

The apex court, however, dropped investigations against Akhilesh's wife Dimple Yadav, as she was not a public servant during the period under investigation.

The apex court bench of Chief Justice Altmas Kabir and Justice HL Dattu, which passed the order, directed the investigating agency not to submit report on its investigations to the Centre.

"We are modifying our order of March 1, 2007, to remove the error in it directing CBI to place the report before the government," the bench said, making it clear that the agency will have to place the probe report before the apex court. "Since CBI is an independent body, there is no obligation for it to file the status report before the government. The CBI, which is probing the case, has to decide what steps it has to take," the Supreme Court bench said.

The SC had ordered a CBI inquiry on March 1, 2007, into the alleged accumulation of disproportionate assets worth 2.63 crore by the Yadav family, on a public interest litigation (PIL) by an advocate, Vishwanath Chaturvedi, a Congress leader. Seeking review of the apex court order, Mulayam and his family members had submitted that there was no evidence against them and that they were being harassed by political adversaries. SP has been charging the government with calibrating investigations against its leaders.

On October 26, 2007, CBI, which sought the court's permission to proceed in the case, had told the court that it had stumbled upon prima facie evidence during preliminary investigations. But this view changed on December 6, 2008, and the Central Bureau of Investigation approached the court to withdraw the case.

The agency claimed before the court that there was a grave error in its calculation of assets possessed by UP's first family.

Seeking review of the apex court order, Mulayam and his family members had submitted that there was no evidence against them and that they were being harassed by political adversaries. They had assailed the apex court's earlier order claiming it would "set a dangerous precedent" of allowing political opponents to file "false and frivolous" petitions against their detractors.